#322
Dec 1, 2024
Books
This week I read:
Moria: Through the Doors of Durin for The One Ring RPG from Free League Publishing
This is really cool! There’s a lot of great stuff in this book and I want to get it to the table some time. But it did strike me as so… empty. I mean, that’s not really a surprise: Gandalf planned to get the fellowship through Moria by taking advantage of its vast size to just walk through without meeting any orcs, and they’d have managed it too if it wasn’t for the incident with the well. It’s big enough that you can travel for days without seeing another living soul.
The locations that are detailed are highly evocative, but adventuring in Moria would involve a lot of empty ruined halls. I don’t think the book supports a campaign where exploration is the goal, it assumes a more mission-oriented approach whee you head into Moria to achieve some set of objectives, and then you return to base camp. It’s a very different sort of megadungeon to Arden Vul, that’s for sure.
It also comes with a lengthy appendix on solo play, where you take the role of one of Balin’s captains in his doomed attempt to retake Moria, leading a band of doughty dwarves on daring missions into the deep and the dark. I’m going to give that a go, and even if it doesn’t work for me I’ve already found its random mission generator useful in my Arden Vul prep (to determine how an NPC faction reacted to an opportunity).
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
A pretty eventful session this week: over half the party died, including the one PC who had survived from the beginning! Fortunately, the survivors were able to get the bodies back to Gosterwick where they used their connections with the temples of Demma and Mitra to get a bunch of resurrections done. So everyone lived in the end.
But the cost was pretty steep: in their rush to return the bodies, the party had to give up the secrecy of their magical teleporting rugs that allowed them to fast-travel between Gosterwick and their room in the goblin halls. Lady Alexia confiscated one rug and King Weskenim the other, and now there’s a very lucrative magical trade set-up between Gosterwick and the goblins. The party did negotiate free passage, but they’ve lost the ability to move the rugs around.
Akkadian
More Anki this week: verbs are still hard.
I’ve started an “Advent of Ištar” today, where every day this month up to Christmas I will be working through the poem The Descent of Ištar into the Netherworld. I’m posting updates over on the fediverse.
Miscellaneous
I slipped with a kitchen knife and cut my left index finger pretty badly on Wednesday, which resulted in a trip to A&E where they glued the wound shut and bandaged me up. I have to keep it covered and dry until the 10th, which is pretty inconvenient but what can you do? I should have been more careful.
There’s no ligament or tendon damage so it should be just like normal after healing.
The thing that surprised me is how little it hurt. I slipped and somehow just knew I’d cut myself but I don’t remember feeling anything; I looked and saw a pretty big cut and then the blood started. A lot of blood. My kitchen looked like a murder scene when I got back home. But other than when they cleaned and glued it at A&E (which hurt a lot) it’s just not really caused any pain. If I accidentally put stress on the cut it hurts, but otherwise there’s only a slight soreness. Whereas a papercut is agony.